The Final Countdown: Econ of Organizations In Review
As we come to the end of the semester, there comes a time to reflect on all of the lessons we've learned from the class. This is sometimes referred to as "ICES forms time", but there are also ways to reflect on a class that actually matter. Hopefully, this blog post and all others like it are helpful in ways that the ICES forms are not.
Lessons Learned
What have we learned in Econ of Orgs? Well, I'll certainly never forget that finger guns refer to the holdup problem. But outside of that, I've learned a ton about management structures. As someone who would like to go into Project Management upon graduation, this is certainly something that interests me. The various types of managers, monitoring, and rising to your level of incompetence are all things that I feel will stick with me well into my professional career.
Class Structure
The class structure was perhaps a bit too optimistic. While it makes perfect sense to have every class open to student discussion at any point, the actual application of this can be troublesome. When you're sitting in class, on what is perhaps your second or third class of the day, and discussion is one hundred percent optional, it can be hard to be motivated to actually participate. In fact, the blog posts may make this even harder. One might feel redundant going to class and discussing topical issues from the class when you are probably going to go home and write those same things in your blog post for the week.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I felt that the excel homework was very distant from the rest of the class materials. While it did involve topics relevant to the course such as insurance, shirking, game theory, etc., it was very numerical and full of formulas that didn't appear elsewhere. It almost felt like a completely different take on the same material, which was otherwise entirely theory-based and conceptual.
My Process
Excel:
For the excel homework, I would usually just sit down at begin it the day before it was due, because there was usually something in it that would trip me up. If I didn't finish it that day, I'd take a look at it the next day with a pair of fresh eyes and if I didn't solve it after that, I'd ask a friend in the course. I usually wouldn't spend more than 40 minutes on the excel in one sitting. The actual work would consist of skimming through the text in the document and then figuring out my way through the homework. If I got stuck, I'd read the document in a more in-depth manner or view the attached YouTube clip that would occasionally accompany an Excel homework. This would almost always get me through the whole homework.
Blog posts:
For the blogging, I would often sit down without any ideas in my head and follow the prompt through-and-through. The structure of the prompt helped me to focus my post and relate it to the class material a bit easier. I'd begin by thinking of what story or example I'd use in the post, then try and come up with a catchy or clever title for the post. All in all, the process might take me around 20-30 minutes if I'm actually focusing on it.
Things I'd Like To See
What would I like to see in the class? Participation points! Sure, we got the extra credit for doing the surveys, but I'd want some kind of incentive to participate in the live classroom and talk to my fellow students. Sometimes I'd be nervous to get the question wrong so I would hesitate to participate ever. If we got the sort of blanket participation credit that many courses provide, I might be less hesitant to talk in class.
I liked your first sentence in the class structure section. Evidently it was too optimistic. But I'm still not sure why. So let me flip around your last section and ask the question this way. Suppose my overriding goal was to get students to appreciate gift exchange and good citizenship and to have them practice that in their own lives, such as in our class. If you were designing the course, how would do you do that, or is it even possible to do that?
ReplyDeleteYou will note, for example, that I didn't grade individual blog posts and I'm actually not real big on the student equivalent of pay-for-performance, which you might call grade-for-performance. If there is a possibility of being intrinsically motivated to get into the material, and you did provide some possibility of that up front in your post, my belief is that grades need to move to background so intrinsic motivation can come front and center. Indeed, that is optimistic. Do you think it isn't possible at all?
Let me also comment on the Excel stuff - which did the formal economic modeling - and the other stuff - which you described as more conceptual. I would say they are both conceptual but one is mathematical and the other is narrative. For you the two approaches were entirely disjoint. I did mean for them to be distinct but to converge to create a better picture overall. If they didn't converge for you, then the follow up question is whether they might have, had you changed your process or would they remain distinct because you can't see a way to bring them together? I will say that for me they are different ways of looking at the same thing. But I've been doing this for a while. The question is whether for somebody just learning this at the start, if the dual approach is nonetheless useful.
You were quite specific about time on task. I thank you for that. But, truthfully, I think the results you reported are to a big extent not putting in more time to produce a better understanding. Which brings this full cycle. My belief is that if you are instrumental about doing the homework, because it is required and you get some points for doing it, then you'll time minimize to complete the work. But if you the issues that the homework is trying to investigate interest you in their own right, then you'll try to develop some understanding of the issues, which might go well beyond completing the assignment. So on this point I would ask, did you go about the homework in my class the way you would approach assignments in other classes? And, if so, do you think you've been enculturated by it.
As an aside, but I think a relevant, quite apart from the subject matter of my class, a broader life skill that every student needs to master is to be able to self teach, new ideas and new skills. The learning doesn't stop after you graduate. The question is, how do you do that well when there are no external incentives? And the follow up question is, if you don't do it well now, what can you do to improve in this dimension down the road?
The optimism in me is that you see a need to cultivate that skill and then to use my class as practice for doing so. I wish I could communicate that to students earlier in the semester. If you have any thoughts on how that might be done, I'd appreciate getting them.
I think that, given the important of GPA on a student's career, it is inherent for one to try to go for the lowest possible time-to-points ratio as to make sure one has plenty of time to do all of their work and not detract from other classes and their personal lives. In classes like this one, points are certainly not the main focus, but they are definitely still there. This is not an "easy A" and one must actually put in some effort to obtain points. However, since the class is more focused on understanding and learning, what needs to be done to get points is often unclear. This results in a more experimental form of participation, where one does a certain amount of work, figures out the point results, and then tries again until they are doing the least work they can do for maximum (or near maximum) points. With this class, the work is graded infrequently, and students are left struggling to figure out what they actually "need" to be doing, leaving them focused only on getting the proper grades instead of focusing on learning the actual material.
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